I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is free.